There are actually plenty of things I like in Vista that make it a better user experience - little things too like cancelable I/O, late starting services (that improve boot performance), low priority I/O which improves performance of forground apps when background apps are runnings (things like backup, optimize etc). Oh and the ability to minimize copy/move windows - which is pretty nice.
Aero is pretty cool too - since everything is copied back to the Aero display goodbye image tear issues, directx/open gl apps that take over your display. This isn't useful for productivity issues, but it means that you could play a game, watch a video or tv channel all at the same time with little or no issues (handy if you play games and watch tv at the same time). Live icons which show you whats on the screen in real time - which from what I understand only the latest prototypes of OSX have.
Document preview pane is pretty cool too - it shows you what is inside the document in Windows Explorer.
The new search feature is pretty nice - lets me find nearly anything (even programs, control panel applets etc) really quickly.
I realize that for mac people this is old hat - but for Windows users I think its a pretty nice upgrade.
You know one thing MS could do that would be charitable is just give the poor guy 12 licenses and tell the Russian courts to fuck off once and for all.
Having been the Europe many times, I've often been asked by friends and colleagues why we in the US don't have high speed trains everywhere. Well, considering that - if we used the fastest TVGs and ICEs they have in the EU - it would still take about 7 hours to take a train from Seattle (where I live) to San Francisco - the nearest big city (assuming 300 KPH and slowing down for the occasional towns/crossings). Or 30 hours from Seattle to Miami, at the same average speed.
I live in Seattle - the next nearest big city is Vancouver BC, and if you don't count Canada the next nearest big City is Boise or Portland Oregon... - if you don't count anything in Washington (like Spokane, Tacoma or Olympia).
Those destinations would be ideal for high speed rail, and a really fast train could get to those places in less than an hour in some cases.
I've lost count of the amount of people who I've run into in WoW who left Everquest because EQ was becoming way to intense. Things like mob camping really don't happen in WoW for example - where I've heard EQ players will sleep in shifts to be the next to down some epic creature who drops something really cool.
Not that WoW is perfect either - they encourage the whole time sink concept. Good example of this is Cenarion Expedition reputation - you'd have to run Steamvaults something like 50+ times (each run takes about an hour and half with a good team) before reaching exalted. Or use some equally inane strategy. While I've never heard of anyone sleeping in shifts I've heard its not uncommon in a raiding guild to do that to 3am every day of the week.
My guess is you have a hundred different "playsforsure" players. Thing is if you are a music store and you want to sell drm'd tunes you can't actually support the ipod because its proprietary.
I actually like Windows. I have a bunch of Linux servers, I even manage a bunch at work - and I'd pick Linux for a server any day over Windows, but every time I have tried to use Linux as a desktop its actually the small things that drive me nuts. Is it alt+c, ctrl+c, or does the selected text just copy itself to the clipboard? Or maybe the clipboard doesn't work at all in the app I'm in. Getting 3D support on my display adapter isn't fun either. Then there's all the bugs in the various applets that come with the distro, everything from settings that don't work to cryptic/confusing settings. How do I add fonts to the machine? Change the screen resolution? I have a Mac too and all these things are easy and consistent as they are on Windows.
From the days of CDE (which was complete garbage) I think we've grown leaps and bounds, but there's a lot of usability studies I think need to be done - its definitely not just an afraid of change thing, although I have met people who have used nothing but Solaris and find every other OS in the world confusing.
Would Citrix work for any user who downloads your applet off your website? No not really because with Citrix you'll need the client app, client access license (paid for annually) and a connection to a live presentation server.
For a custom solution Apollo would eliminate all the cost/infrastructure surrounding Citrix.
This statement is simply there to force appliance manufacturers to license the player - kinda like the way Sony licensed it for the PSP. Or phone companies/operators license it for phones.
I've never read the Java license agreement, but I'm sure it has similar intent.
Anyone who has actually worked with a satellite (and not just watching TV) and I've worked with a few (mostly leo) knows that satellite's have lots of bugs, some fail within the first few orbits because of charging defects. I've worked with satellites that have dead transponders (sometimes on more than one band), poor/wobbly orbits etc.
The thing that keeps a lot of these satellites operational though is they have extremely flexible software and hardware, and backup systems to help solve issues operators are having.
So I think your right - they will still have to build these to the same specs they are now, just now if you have a serious problem that jeopardizes the mission you maybe have a slight chance of fixing it.
Like that really makes any difference. Mac people always tout this is some amazing feature, but in reality the actual OSX platform has little to do with the way unix traditionally works. For all it matters it could be some customer kernel sitting under Quartz and its pretty UI.
Its also a partial implementation - for instance try connecting to your mac via xdmcp out of the box? Or connect to another unix machine via xsession?
A lot of unixish services are disabled too in OSX - probably so they won't conflict the way a Mac is supposed to work - mostly revolving around the way file systems are mounted and handled.
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
You can have a "full bash implementation" on Windows too - look up cygwin. I doubt most mac users even care (except their computer runs Unix - whatever that is)
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
XP has color management, but I'll grant you OSX's is better. If your using all Adobe apps however (and in 1 you seem to be) all that is out of the window because Adobe has their own color management system and its the same on Windows and Mac (see Adobe ACE).
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
Seems like a personal issue to me. I rather have separate mailboxes.
I'll skip 5 - I'm not a musician...
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
I have a mac - I don't see any difference in the quality of open source or shareware applications or accountability. Same with commercial apps. With usability - again I don't see any real difference. Its purely a matter of preference in this case.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
Do this - edit any file via finder with a dot in front of it - out of the box with no modifications (and yes I know you can go to the shell and change a preference to view hidden files). In windows its a ui option that lets me see hidden files.
Nor can you browse to many system locations like/etc.
In Windows Program Files are where Program Files are kept. My Documents are where your documents are kept (on the Mac they call this Documents). I could keep going, but I don't see why...
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
I'll give you this one too - OSX's sudo style of security is much nicer. Still - if XP/2000 users didn't use their machine as admin all the time I doubt malware would be an issue either - it never has been for me.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
Again - probably a personal preference. I looked at my mac sitting on my desk next to me. With the same monitor I'll give yo
What everyone needs to start doing is put "I am a terrorist" in the metadata of every email that is sent, or relayed which in turn would generate a huge amount of traffic on their reporting system. You could do the same thing with websites as well.
I think after a day or two the problem would solve itself.
My father worked retail at London Drug for a while. He saw Sony stuff, and Sanyo stuff come back defective all the time, however it rarely saw anything from Panasonic returned.
My own experience with Sony hardware is actually the same. I've thrown out a lot of Sony stuff, but everything I have that has been made by Panasonic I still have and still works.
At least with doom 3 you got cool visuals, and they delivered what previous versions of doom delivered. I wasn't surprised - I bought the game because I wanted a shoot-a-thon. I liked it for that:) - plus its one of the creepier games I've ever played - especially later on when they introduce those floating heads.
But that was the law - first count was close enough to call a recount, second recount happened because the first was close also - and she happened to win that one.
Good thing too - Rossi actually quoted as saying Alcohol and Cigarette taxes hurt families. (don't think too hard about that one).
Everquest and a lot of the mmo's never lasted a week on my hdd - however I really like to play WoW. I think the reason is that WoW is actually pretty well designed. I've really only ever run into one or two bugs - neither of which affected me.
Plus I've never had to mob camp - which is (from people I've talked to on WoW) the biggest problem with Everquest. You could sit there and wait 2-3 days to kill a single mob.
With more and more content the game really becomes less linear - which I think is a good thing.
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There are actually plenty of things I like in Vista that make it a better user experience - little things too like cancelable I/O, late starting services (that improve boot performance), low priority I/O which improves performance of forground apps when background apps are runnings (things like backup, optimize etc). Oh and the ability to minimize copy/move windows - which is pretty nice.
Aero is pretty cool too - since everything is copied back to the Aero display goodbye image tear issues, directx/open gl apps that take over your display. This isn't useful for productivity issues, but it means that you could play a game, watch a video or tv channel all at the same time with little or no issues (handy if you play games and watch tv at the same time). Live icons which show you whats on the screen in real time - which from what I understand only the latest prototypes of OSX have.
Document preview pane is pretty cool too - it shows you what is inside the document in Windows Explorer.
The new search feature is pretty nice - lets me find nearly anything (even programs, control panel applets etc) really quickly.
I realize that for mac people this is old hat - but for Windows users I think its a pretty nice upgrade.
You know one thing MS could do that would be charitable is just give the poor guy 12 licenses and tell the Russian courts to fuck off once and for all.
Having been the Europe many times, I've often been asked by friends and colleagues why we in the US don't have high speed trains everywhere. Well, considering that - if we used the fastest TVGs and ICEs they have in the EU - it would still take about 7 hours to take a train from Seattle (where I live) to San Francisco - the nearest big city (assuming 300 KPH and slowing down for the occasional towns/crossings). Or 30 hours from Seattle to Miami, at the same average speed.
I live in Seattle - the next nearest big city is Vancouver BC, and if you don't count Canada the next nearest big City is Boise or Portland Oregon... - if you don't count anything in Washington (like Spokane, Tacoma or Olympia).
Those destinations would be ideal for high speed rail, and a really fast train could get to those places in less than an hour in some cases.
You need exhausted to buy/use all those recipes and plans from them however...
I've lost count of the amount of people who I've run into in WoW who left Everquest because EQ was becoming way to intense. Things like mob camping really don't happen in WoW for example - where I've heard EQ players will sleep in shifts to be the next to down some epic creature who drops something really cool.
Not that WoW is perfect either - they encourage the whole time sink concept. Good example of this is Cenarion Expedition reputation - you'd have to run Steamvaults something like 50+ times (each run takes about an hour and half with a good team) before reaching exalted. Or use some equally inane strategy. While I've never heard of anyone sleeping in shifts I've heard its not uncommon in a raiding guild to do that to 3am every day of the week.
Technical support - and no I'm not kidding.
My guess is you have a hundred different "playsforsure" players. Thing is if you are a music store and you want to sell drm'd tunes you can't actually support the ipod because its proprietary.
I don't see how this is the case, as most of their formats are open or standard anyhow.
I actually like Windows. I have a bunch of Linux servers, I even manage a bunch at work - and I'd pick Linux for a server any day over Windows, but every time I have tried to use Linux as a desktop its actually the small things that drive me nuts. Is it alt+c, ctrl+c, or does the selected text just copy itself to the clipboard? Or maybe the clipboard doesn't work at all in the app I'm in. Getting 3D support on my display adapter isn't fun either. Then there's all the bugs in the various applets that come with the distro, everything from settings that don't work to cryptic/confusing settings. How do I add fonts to the machine? Change the screen resolution? I have a Mac too and all these things are easy and consistent as they are on Windows.
From the days of CDE (which was complete garbage) I think we've grown leaps and bounds, but there's a lot of usability studies I think need to be done - its definitely not just an afraid of change thing, although I have met people who have used nothing but Solaris and find every other OS in the world confusing.
Would Citrix work for any user who downloads your applet off your website? No not really because with Citrix you'll need the client app, client access license (paid for annually) and a connection to a live presentation server.
For a custom solution Apollo would eliminate all the cost/infrastructure surrounding Citrix.
Silly human - everyone knows no-one uses BSD for anything.
This statement is simply there to force appliance manufacturers to license the player - kinda like the way Sony licensed it for the PSP. Or phone companies/operators license it for phones.
I've never read the Java license agreement, but I'm sure it has similar intent.
Anyone who has actually worked with a satellite (and not just watching TV) and I've worked with a few (mostly leo) knows that satellite's have lots of bugs, some fail within the first few orbits because of charging defects. I've worked with satellites that have dead transponders (sometimes on more than one band), poor/wobbly orbits etc.
The thing that keeps a lot of these satellites operational though is they have extremely flexible software and hardware, and backup systems to help solve issues operators are having.
So I think your right - they will still have to build these to the same specs they are now, just now if you have a serious problem that jeopardizes the mission you maybe have a slight chance of fixing it.
Like that really makes any difference. Mac people always tout this is some amazing feature, but in reality the actual OSX platform has little to do with the way unix traditionally works. For all it matters it could be some customer kernel sitting under Quartz and its pretty UI.
Its also a partial implementation - for instance try connecting to your mac via xdmcp out of the box? Or connect to another unix machine via xsession?
A lot of unixish services are disabled too in OSX - probably so they won't conflict the way a Mac is supposed to work - mostly revolving around the way file systems are mounted and handled.
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
/etc.
You can have a "full bash implementation" on Windows too - look up cygwin. I doubt most mac users even care (except their computer runs Unix - whatever that is)
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
XP has color management, but I'll grant you OSX's is better. If your using all Adobe apps however (and in 1 you seem to be) all that is out of the window because Adobe has their own color management system and its the same on Windows and Mac (see Adobe ACE).
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
Seems like a personal issue to me. I rather have separate mailboxes.
I'll skip 5 - I'm not a musician...
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
I have a mac - I don't see any difference in the quality of open source or shareware applications or accountability. Same with commercial apps. With usability - again I don't see any real difference. Its purely a matter of preference in this case.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
Do this - edit any file via finder with a dot in front of it - out of the box with no modifications (and yes I know you can go to the shell and change a preference to view hidden files). In windows its a ui option that lets me see hidden files.
Nor can you browse to many system locations like
In Windows Program Files are where Program Files are kept. My Documents are where your documents are kept (on the Mac they call this Documents). I could keep going, but I don't see why...
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
I'll give you this one too - OSX's sudo style of security is much nicer. Still - if XP/2000 users didn't use their machine as admin all the time I doubt malware would be an issue either - it never has been for me.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
Again - probably a personal preference. I looked at my mac sitting on my desk next to me. With the same monitor I'll give yo
What everyone needs to start doing is put "I am a terrorist" in the metadata of every email that is sent, or relayed which in turn would generate a huge amount of traffic on their reporting system. You could do the same thing with websites as well.
I think after a day or two the problem would solve itself.
My father worked retail at London Drug for a while. He saw Sony stuff, and Sanyo stuff come back defective all the time, however it rarely saw anything from Panasonic returned.
My own experience with Sony hardware is actually the same. I've thrown out a lot of Sony stuff, but everything I have that has been made by Panasonic I still have and still works.
At least with doom 3 you got cool visuals, and they delivered what previous versions of doom delivered. I wasn't surprised - I bought the game because I wanted a shoot-a-thon. I liked it for that :) - plus its one of the creepier games I've ever played - especially later on when they introduce those floating heads.
Or possibly, your ISP goes out of business :P
For comcast customers this might be a good thing.
"Rising Tide" Theory (lifts all boats)
Assuming you have a boat...
But that was the law - first count was close enough to call a recount, second recount happened because the first was close also - and she happened to win that one.
Good thing too - Rossi actually quoted as saying Alcohol and Cigarette taxes hurt families. (don't think too hard about that one).
Actually nowhere in Windows is networking called a service.
This is so they can license and sell per seat licenses to makers of embedded platforms. Good example of this is the Sony PSP or Playstation 3.
Everquest and a lot of the mmo's never lasted a week on my hdd - however I really like to play WoW. I think the reason is that WoW is actually pretty well designed. I've really only ever run into one or two bugs - neither of which affected me.
Plus I've never had to mob camp - which is (from people I've talked to on WoW) the biggest problem with Everquest. You could sit there and wait 2-3 days to kill a single mob.
With more and more content the game really becomes less linear - which I think is a good thing.
Premier may suck, but there are motion picture companies using it > http://www.adobe.com/motion/superman_returns.html